Pressure
by Alfie Bibbit
Summary: A snapshot of life on the ward for the damaged acutes, and a glimpse into the events that led them there.
1. Chapter 1

Pressure –

"Mr. Harding?" Harding's head jerks up like a puppet on a string, the way his hands fly up when he talks animatedly, strung up at the wrists with long, ivory fingers dangling.

"Is there something you'd like to say to the group?" She speaks, with her red-tipped fingers coiled around the edges of Harding's file, calmly, and with almost undetectable malice, her voice as cool and steady as her unflinching enamel features.

Across from Harding is seated a thin, timid-looking young man. Most of the time, only the top of his wiry brown hair is visible, his head bowed. Occasionally, his eyes flicker upwards to Harding, and then back down to his feet, avoiding her cold gaze like a small vulnerable animal. Like prey. Her eyes are the trap, the snare, the headlights.

His hands wring themselves around each other, like they're burrowing with no where to go. On the backs of them, circular scars in hues from crimson to white punctuate his pale skin. Jutting from the slack sleeves of his checkered shirt, his elbows rest on his lean thighs.

"Billy, dear, what about you? Is there anything you'd like to contribute to this matter?"

Fidgeting hands shift from the knotted mass of wavering fingers and the convalescent pyjama pants that bunch up at the sides of his knees. He tugs at them nervously, and his small eyes close for extended seconds as he struggles to spit out his words.

"Uh-n-n-no Miss Ratched."

"Are you sure, Billy? I'd like to write in my notes that you added to the discussion, just once. Have you nothing to say on the issue?"

Billy squirms, twisting his pant legs around his knees awkwardly, as if her very suggestion, her putting him at the centre of attention places him on a psychological rack.

He shakes his head, choking on the words "no ma'am", until he gives up, and turns his face away.

"Very well, we'll continue this tomorrow gentlemen."

There's a screech of chairs moving as the men get up and shuffle away from the circle with their seats quickly, before she has a chance to call them back.

"Billy dear?"

Harding glances over his shoulder at Billy, and sees his face twist with almost painfully anxiety at her call.

He places his chair down, and immediately his hands begin to fidget again, twisting and pulling at each other.

He skulks over to her, only able to hold his grey eyes to her for a moment, before darting them away again.  
"Billy, I spoke to your mother this morning."

He winces as if she'd just rubbed salt on a wound.

And he waits for the blow.

Across the room, Harding sits smoking a cigarette between his long fingers, a month old copy of Time magazine lying idly open on his lap, and he watches Billy writhe under the beam of subtle fears she once again drills into him, quietly chipping away at his confidence and self-esteem.

He doesn't hear their conversation, but sees her touching Billy's arm, and watches him flinch, his mouth working like a stuck record player trying to stutter out whatever meagre response he can manage. All the while his hands are wrestling each other, knotted with disquiet. Digging frantically for a way out. And when he turns away from her, and begins to shuffle wanly towards him, the backs of his hands are bleeding.

Finishing his cigarette, Harding sets himself down at the small cards table. He begins to deal pinochle decks to the other men sat around it.

"You wanna play cards Billy?" a chubby, balding man calls out to the skinny acute, still sat wound up in the corner, staring vaguely at the wall.

His eyes dart up as if he'd been caught doing something he shouldn't be.

"N-no."

"Come on Bibbit, we're one man short." Scanlon, a brusque, greying psychotic barks across the room. Billy almost comes out of his skin. A cigarette sticks out of the side of Scanlon's mouth, his hands guarding a wooden box on his lap.

"Ask M-m-martini."

"Aw nuts." Cheswick sighs, and looks over his shoulder, scanning the room for their final player.

"Hey Martini!"

After a moment, a head of black hair pops up from under a table, where the little Italian has spent his morning, searching with unrestrained enthusiasm for treasures only he can see.

"Yeah?"

"Wanna play some pinochle?"  
"Yeah!"

He bounds across the room, nodding to absolutely no one on his way, and crouches atop of a chair like a squat little monkey perching on a tyre swing.

"What're we playing?"

"I just told ya what we're playing ya dunce."

"Goddamn immigrants coming taking our jobs stupid as a ape can't even know what game we're playing goddamn blow the whole world up's what we should do goddamn blow it all to hell one day just see one day goddamnit," Scanlon chewed on his cigarette, and it bounced nonchalantly between his teeth as he mumbled.

"Pinochle, Martini," Harding articulates, "the same game we play every godforsaken day." He tosses a small pile of cards to Martini, who rifles through the stack, before reaching across the table to exchange them.

"What _are_ you doing Martini?"

"I don't like thum."

"You don't get a choice. That's the point, you backwards primate."

Martini continues to pick out different cards.

"Martini!"

Harding tries to move the deck away from Martini, and Scanlon heaves a sigh.  
"Forget it Harding, no matter what deck he has he still don't know how to play right."

Harding backs away from the deck, throwing his arms up dramatically, his hands lolling on the well-oiled hinges of his wrists, leaving Martini to his business. Out the corner of his eye, he sees Billy, still sat, unmoving aside from the tugging of his sleeve over his bloody hand.

"For heaven's sake William, go to the bathroom before you catch tetanus". He says it in as low a voice as he can manage, his eyes to the floor beside him.

Billy freezes and sits for a moment, gets to his feet and scampers to the bathroom to wash his cuts.

-

William Bibbit Jr. remembered his first visit to Salem State Hospital well. He was eleven years old.

His spindly frame pinned to the back seat of his father's Ford Estate, he peered out of the car window at the white concrete building. It looked to his young eyes like a series of building blocks, varying in size, all stacked up on the land at the end of a long road, shaded by the thick lining of trees that seemed to pillow all the roads in Oregon. There was a yard, surrounded by a high wire fence, with white markings on the ground. He wondered if sick people could play baseball. They could, incidentally, but didn't, as he later would find out years later.

His father parked the car in another grey yard at the side of the block set, and climbed out.

"You wait here. I won't be long," he said, and strolled toward one of the most central blocks, a big one, wide and four stories high. He watched anxiously as his father was eaten up by the large swinging doors of the building.

Although he was only supposed to be picking up his mother, his father seemed to be gone a long time. He looked around outside of the car, half playing eye-spy with himself. He could see no one. Squinting into the windows of the big building, he searched for signs of life. The windows were covered in wire, like the baseball court, so it was hard to make anything out. On the second floor, at the very last window, he caught sight of a man looking out. Maybe he's bored, like me, he thought, looking for someone else. He waved at the man from the car. He didn't wave back. He didn't even flinch. He just stared out, motionless, like a dummy in a shop window.

He felt a shudder go down his spine, and he looked away. The man had spooked him. He couldn't sit in the car any longer. He undid his seat belt and swung a thin leg out of the door.

It was fall, and the trees were beginning to shed their seeds and fruits. He scuffed his plimsolls in the dirt. Picking up an acorn from the ground, he skimmed it through the air. It didn't get far, hitting a low branch of the tree in front of him. The branches shivered with the impact, disrupting the shadows at his feet cast by the late afternoon sun. Suddenly, they rustled again, and a tiny red squirrel scuttled down the trunk. It cocked its head up, looking right at him. He abruptly felt a sickening guilt that he had disturbed the creature with his acorn. It corkscrewed around the base of the tree, coming to a halt on the ground in front of him, tiny black beads staring. He stood perfectly still, afraid that it might jump at him and bite him. He knew from school that they bit sometimes, for food or in defence, and that they could carry rabies.

A car door slammed behind him, and his concentration shattered, his heart racing cold and hard in his chest. The creature shot away, like a magician, faster than he could see. He turned to see a white van, two uniformed men at its back doors. They swung open with a clatter, and the two men reached inside and pulled out a man. At least he looked like a man.

He was like a giant. Towering as tall as the van itself as he unfolded himself and stretched up. He had long black hair and tan skin, a big strong face with high cheekbones, like the men he'd seen from the reservations. He was handcuffed, and one of the men towed him out towards the building where his father had gone.

He looked up at the giant man, naively and gracelessly unaware of his jaw hanging slack.

This man was different to the one in the window; he looked right at him, right at him.

He looked away quickly, suddenly embarrassed, shoving his hands in his pockets as they led the man away.

The sun was setting but still warm, so he set himself down at a tree trunk. Not the tree he had thrown the acorn at however, as he was afraid the squirrel might come back and jump on his head. He wiped his dusty hands on his skinny knees, and began to twist a blade of grass in his hands. He sat, fidgeting unconsciously with the grass, and wondered about the big man. Why had the hospital men lead him away like that? What had he done? Why was he here? He certainly didn't look sick. Mother never spoke of her work at the hospital, but had explained to him that things could go wrong with people's minds as well as their bodies, and that's what had happened to the people at her hospital, where they came to get better. It looked a lot more like a prison than a hospital to Billy; you didn't often see police taking people into hospital in handcuffs.

Billy had asked her if they all get better. He knew some people whose bodies got sick didn't get better, like his grandfather. But then again, he was very old.

Mother said no.

The orange sun splaying around him from behind the tree, he felt his eyes begin to close.

"Oh Billy," came a woman's disenchanted voice, snapping his eyes open once again.

"Look at the state of you, come here."

Billy's mother appeared at his side, hauling him up by his wrist. She went to the car, and sat her square behind on the backseat. Shaking her head she pulled him down onto her knee, took out a handkerchief and wiped his hands, licking it and giving his face an impromptu wash, although as far as he could recall, it was not dirty.

-

It was almost seventeen years later that William visited the hospital again. This time however, he was driven by a man who worked there, and not his father. Father had been gone a long time. In the back seat of the car, tail between his legs, Billy thought back to that summer when he was eleven, wondering what that man might have done to be led into the hospital like a criminal.

Now he understood.

-

It was a Sunday afternoon, warm and glowing and quiet like all Sundays should be. He walked past rows and rows of houses, practising his speech over and over, muttering it under his breath, so absorbed that he didn't notice the a man in a trilby hat, probably on his way back from church, walking towards him. His bony body bumped the man hard. Stumbling in shock, he fell to his knees to scoop up the bouquet of flowers he had been carrying.

"I'm s-s-sorry, sir, I d-d-d-didn't see you, I'm s-s-sorry– "

"Don't worry son, no harm done." The man smiled, almost sympathetically at Billy as he rearranged his battered pink flowers.

"And good luck with those flowers." He winked, and strolled away.

"Th-thank you sir."

A few minutes later he arrived, more flustered than ever, at his destination; a small brick house on the corner of Butler Street, Salem. Ivy cascaded down its front, guiding the admirer to its front door.

He stood with his hand poised over its door, mustering his courage. He must've been standing there a long time, because before he had the chance to knock, he was spotted through the small glass window, and the door swung open, presenting to him a vision of blonde hair and emerald green eyes.

"Billy? What're you doing here?"

"I-I-I hhhhave something I w-w-whanna ask you," he said, his heart drumming as fast and desperately as his tongue, he reached inside his jacket pocket and pulled out a small black box.

"C-c-Celia, w-w-w-will you mmmmmarry me?"

Her face was a confusing mixture of surprise, pity, and antipathy.

She seemed to stifle a giggle at his efforts, and said simply, "Oh Billy."

­-

William sits alone in the bathroom of his mother's house. Perched on the side of the bath, he waits for the pain to abate.

He thinks of how intense and all-consuming the pain is when you accidentally touch a boiling kettle, the jolt of your insides and the cold heavy feeling that fills you up.

You wait a few seconds, and it begins to fade. He waits, but this time, the pain does not subside. He knows, sometimes it takes a long time, and even then, you'll still bear the scar. It never really goes away.

But this time was different. He is used to humiliation. He feels it every day. From his mother, his teachers, the other students. Every time he opens his mouth. His crushing sense of inferiority has over-ridden any glint of personality he had once had. And now, it is just too much.

The breath inside him is searing and it makes every inch of him sore. The heat and weight of the sadness makes him feel heavy, and it boils in his eyes. But despite it all, he feels empty. There's nothing inside him now, just faint whispers of those he'll leave behind, and the echo of every time he ever felt small, every time he was nothing.

And that's what he is at this moment, leaning over the sink, one of his father's old razorblades poised in his hand over his slender wrist; an aching accumulation of everything that had ever hurt him. He wants to write a note, but he can't find the words. He manages to stop his hand shaking long enough to set the edge of the blade against his wrist. He presses down.

Hard.

Closes his eyes.

And drags.

It takes less than a pound of pressure to break skin.


	2. Chapter 2

The sun barely up, the floors are mopped. Pills are popped into paper cups. Switches in the station are flipped. The lucid, callous lights flicker on.

Nothing goes unseen.

Through a microphone, a voice booms through speaks over the day room.

Medication time. All patients to the day room. Medication.

"Good morning, Mr. Harding."

Harding's acerbic nature is fermented by the early winter morning, as he files toward the nurses' station, receiving his daily bread with a tiny cup of water.

"Are you sure?"

In his late thirties, Dale Harding is handsome, with the kind of face out of place in somewhere like this, and the other patients look at him with a vague familiarity, as if they might've seen him in a movie somewhere.

He rolls his eyes aloft, theatrical and effete.

"Dear Lord, for the tranquility we are about to receive, we thank thee."

He doesn't slump down with an ungainly thud like the other men do, aside from Billy, who sits as quietly as possible, trying not to draw attention to himself. Harding places himself accurately on the chair, as if judging the physics of the distance and speed at which he sits perfectly. As if he was some dainty modest maid, wearing a skirt, and lifting it at the sides with graceful fingertips, the way he flounces down to the chair and crosses his legs with poise.

Surrounded by the tools for passing the time, cigarettes, cards, and outdated magazines, Harding settles himself down for another day in the madhouse. They come like clockwork from the station, topped up and dumbed down. Cheswick, Scanlon, Taber, Frederickson, Seefelt, Billy. The Colonel is wheeled out. Ruckly, the human crucifix propped against the wall where he will remain all day. Bromden mops the hallway floors; treatment has ceased for him, now more a conscripted caretaker than a patient. Martini has not yet bounded onto the scene, but this is not unusual; the man is easily distracted.

Harding idly opens a magazine to the puzzles page, in a desperate search for intellectual stimulation. The crosswords, like all the other pages, have been 'filled in' with meaningless words and covered in black scribble. He tosses the page over, and sighs.

Hours later, the familiar clunk of the ward door sends heads snapping upwards. Harding is embroiled in some outdated political article, concentrating harder on blocking out Cheswick and Scanlon's inane squabbling than the article itself. Eventually, you learn to phase out the humdrum noise of the ward. The screeching of the chairs. The drone of Lawrence Welk warbling through the speakers. The constant muttering and babbling of tired and deranged men.

Once you've shut all that out, there are not many sounds that can snap you back into your horrible surroundings.

"Dale?"

-

Vera Knox is the kind of woman that men stare at in the street. The kind of woman men whistle at as she passes. The kind of woman that incites lasciviousness in the most noble of the species. The kind of woman you would not expect to marry a man like Dale Harding.

She strolls into the ward with as much grace as is possible when walking on six inches of platform heels. All breasts and lips, she is the most womanly creature the men have seen in a painfully unfathomable length of time. If some of the more outgoing patients had not have been tied down, they would have leapt at her, jaws hanging slack and slobbering, before she knew what'd hit her.

"Hello Dale. How've you been?"

She has a sexy, gravely kind of voice. As she strolls over and stands in front of Dale Harding, the men envy his view, and their eyes follow her across the room.

"Oh," Dale sighs, "as well as one can be, surrounded by lunatics and imbeciles."

She is unfazed. She pulls up a chair to the card table beside him, and lights a cigarette.

"And what of the delectable Vera? How has she been lumbering on without her stalwart spouse?"

"Just fine, Dale, just fine." And she smiles a smoky smile. "Plen'y of good strong men in the world to take care of little old me."

Harding flickers with antagonism.

"And just what are you implying by that, sweetness?"

Her voice discloses flecks of a Southern upbringing; a seductive drawl the polar opposite to Harding's discriminating and long-winded dialogue.

"I didn't mean nothing by it Dale, jeez. You shouldn't be so sensitive."

"_Anything_, my bright little child, you didn't mean _anything_ by it. Although I'd wager to the contrary were we to start on semantics."

She sighs brusquely and sucks on her cigarette with her ruby red lips.

"Your friends have been around looking for you," she breathes. There is something about the way she says friends that implies there is more to this statement then she betrays.

"Have they indeed. I wasn't aware that I still retained any."

"Oh you know the ones; dainty boys with hair combed all neat, and their flipping little wrists."

Harding does not rise to her bait this time, but bites his tongue. He is both antagonist and victim. The superior and the cuckold.

He may find himself high above to his wife in terms of culture and intellect, but the way men looked at her, staring at her as if he weren't there at all, was enough to crush the most masculine creature.

Harding was not man enough for Vera, nor was Vera intellectual enough for him. And while Harding found consolation in books and his framed college degree, Vera found it in the beds of other men. Or so he suspected.

As for his friends, they were more than enough to make him an outcast. A delicate nature, chic acquaintances and hearsay of his habitual engagement in behaviour not viewed as standard practice for a man: these were enough for others to 'suggest' that he might do well to vacation from normal society.

"Anyway Dale, I better get going, lots to do. I'll be back soon."

At that Vera Harding turned on her heels and parades out of the ward, blowing a kiss to the Black warden on her way out. Harding watched her leave in silence, before turning a distracted eye back to his magazine.

"Pity."

After his cartoon eyes have consumed the last inch of Vera in view as she disappears through the steel doors, Frank Scanlon turns to Harding.

"Goddamn Harding. How'd _you _of all people come by a thing like that?"

"Oh," Harding sighs, "you know, girl meets boy, boy charms girl with his dazzling cosmopolitan magnetism, girl is desperate to flee her mother's home, boy marries girl, girl sleeps with other men, boy moves into local mental asylum. That old chestnut."

Scanlon stares at Harding blankly, before snapping a curt retort.

"Damn it Harding, why can't ya just say anything straight?"

Harding's fine-featured face is steeled in an apathetic expression; the unappreciated scholar in a brick house of rednecks.

"Alright; I needed to overcompensate and I couldn't afford a fancy car."

-

The clock hangs over the room like a cruel and torturous god, lording the grinding time over its subjects. The days are broken up only by a spate of chores, and the cold clang of the lunch bell. The minutes seem to drip slowly and agonisingly through the metaphorical hourglass, like blood from a small but irritating wound. If it wasn't for the half hour of news screened on an evening, provided the floors had been satisfactorily buffed, the passing of time, of history, could be overlooked completely. Progress evaded them, imprisoned in a clinical groundhog day.

On the wipe clean couch those who are lucid enough to understand the news watch it roll by on the television screen. Some entertainment piece about the latest pop phenomenon flashes forth, and the sounds of screaming adolescent girls bring Martini's hands to his ears sharply.

"Who gives a crap! This ain't news!" Scanlon snarls, banging his wooden box on his lap. "We coulda been bombed, and we wouldn't know nothing about it! They could be bombing us right now!"

"Don't you think," Harding offers wearily, "if the country had been bombed to hell throughout the day that it would be the lead story?"

Martini climbs up on the sofa beside Harding, and tugs on his sleeve.

Harding does his best to ignore him, but the diligence of Martini's pestering touches a nerve.

"What?!"

"I can't find my mother."

"For pity's sake," Harding rolls his eyes and leaves the sofa for a quieter spot.

"You c-c-c-can have m-m-m-mine."

Undeterred by Harding's lack of sympathy, Martini moves onto Scanlon, hopping up on the sofa

clumsily, sending Scanlon's precious box clattering to the floor.

"Goddamnit Martini!"

Billy winces. It is the most noise that has been heard on the ward all day, and even the ears of

the heavily medicated prick up.

"You greaseball bastard!"

Darting over to the remains of his box, which it seems, has been empty all the time, Scanlon's eyes flare with hatred. He moves towards Martini like a stung bear, hunched and wild, getting bigger with every step.

Martini, clearly unable to judge the danger of the situation, seems unfazed as Scanlon

grabs him by the collar of his pyjamas and flings him across the floor with as much ease as

Martini had scattered his box.

"You'll kill us all you ginzo motherfucker!"

By this time the mousy little nurse is fumbling in panic with all the buttons in the station, trying

to summon the aides, muttering desperate useless prayers.

"You see what you did? All that work, wasted! Take me years to build that again!"

Billy, cowering on the end of the sofa, pipes up quietly.

"But there was n-n-n-nothing in it, S-scanlon."

Scanlon's attentions immediately turn to Billy. Brandishing a piece of shattered wood, he grabs

him by the back of his head.

"This look like nothing to you boy? This look like nothing?!" Scanlon waves the wood at him.

"This was my ticket outta here! Gonna blow a hole right through the fucking wall! Right through

all you little bastards! Blow you all to hell!"

Three burly aides race through the ward doors armed with truncheons and restraints, but not

before Scanlon releases Billy with a sharp thwack of his wooden shard, knocking the

featherweight patient clean to the floor.

Scanlon follows him down, writhing under the weight of two aides, the third dodging his flailing

legs while trying to tie his wrists behind his back.

A nurse appears and leads Billy, with his knees to his face and blood spotting his white pants,

away to the first aid room, but not before she takes out a needle and sinks it into Scanlon's

behind. Pretty soon, he stopped wriggling.


End file.
